When you are continually deployed, you come home and have a certain period of downtime. That downtime is usually required to decompress. Following decompression, you then have your taskings that you've got to look after. Then you have your career courses you have to look after. By the time you get through the first tasking and never get to your career course, you're put back on alert again to go back onto deployment because it's a matter of resources, because when you make these types of commitments as a government, you have to say that these are the resources that you're going to provide. We don't have infinite resources out there, so when a guy is deployed with 1PPCLI on one commitment and comes back, maybe he's posted over to 2PPCLI, and within six months he's tasked to go back. It's a matter of judging what your resources are.
You asked if there's a way to get out of it. I lived all of my life on military bases. That was them, up on the hill; that was us. We lived in PMQs. We lived in our environment and we lived in our culture. We self-supported each other because that's how we survived. Spouses couldn't work in the local towns because they knew that they'd be gone in two or three years.
You built that community and you protected yourself in that community. That's what you did.
Where do today's individuals go for relief? They go to the Internet. The world is at their fingertips now. I liken it to what I experienced back in the 1970s when I was in Germany. There was a lot of what you might call power drinking and stuff going on. I went back in the 1980s, and do you know what the young guys were doing? They weren't going to the messes and they weren't going to the bars. They were going to the museums. They were going to see the sights. There was a whole cultural change of focus on where the individual wanted to be. That's happened already.